By Muneeb Nasir
(Friday Khutba delivered at Masjid Toronto on September 5, 2008)
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be on him, in a tradition (hadith) is reported to have said:
“The one who fasts during Ramadan with Faith and seeking its rewards will have his/her past sins forgiven.”
The Prophet Muhammad, peace be on him, in another tradition (hadith), is reported to have said:
“Many people who fast get nothing from their fast except hunger and thirst, and many people who pray at night get nothing from it except wakefulness” (Darimi).
As such, there is more to this month of fasting than just abstention or the performance of ritual acts.
From these Islamic teachings, we learn that fasting must be approached with full awareness and with the intention of improving our spirituality and our lives – if not the fasting and additional acts of worship we perform during Ramadan would amount to nothing but hunger, thirst and tiredness.
Fasting is one of the means that Allah has enjoined on mankind throughout human history to bring us closer to our natural disposition (the state of fitra) and for cleansing ourselves from the burdens of disobedience, corruption and misdeeds.
Ramadan is an opportunity for us to develop the moral sense and to reorient our lives to the Creator and the natural path of goodness.
All of these beneficial qualities have combined to make Ramadan a season of prayer and good deeds.
As we go through this month of fasting we should remind ourselves of the goal of this month-long activity.
The goal is Taqwa.
One of the vehicles to enhance Taqwa is fasting in Ramadan.
The rules of engagement are Iman and Ihtisab – faith and seeking its rewards.
However, to fully derive value from fasting we should understand our circumstances and context from which we are entering Ramadan – where we are and how our lives are being lived.
The times we live in
The world we are living is attractive an alluring to the physical self.
People are distracted by the wondrous technology, the abundance of material possessions and by the easy access to information.
It is a world that has become oriented towards materialism and gratification of the physical.
So much so, that most people’s self definition and self worth is connected to what they possess and how much they possess.
Happiness and success are generally defined in material terms – the more we possess, the happier and more successful we have been convinced we will be.
We have become obsessed with the notions of progress, technological development and economic competitiveness.
This has led us down a path of becoming forgetful and, indeed, neglectful of the means of subsistence - air, water, soil, the environment - to the point of being the chief culprits of the global warming crisis.
All of these possessions, greater technology and more information were supposed to make life more comfortable, convenient and efficient.
But it has created the reverse: our lives are more isolated, increasingly self-focused and lonelier.
To be anonymous and alone is a characteristic of our everyday lives.
We’re are usually alone and anonymous when commuting, alone when standing in line, while on the internet and on social networking tools like myspace and facebook.
Facebook is a metaphor of this disconnectedness and drowning into a virtual sea.
Many users say that after creating a profile in Facebook, they found themselves spending hours a day updating their pages, looking for people with shared interests, reading others’ profiles and looking at their photos.
This freedom can be liberating, but it also carries a risk - a seemingly infinite web of connections poses a risk for never-ending wandering, seeing who knows who, who likes what, and how it all fits together, with no particular goal in mind.
The increasing speed of life, along with the mobility of nearly everything and everyone has created a mindset specific to this age – we keep to our selves while complaining about the loss of connections and social interactions.
Email, cell phones, the internet are encouraging us to be careless, insensitive, rushed when interacting with others.
We are interacting with others not for the sake of conversation and for developing meaningful relationships, but in order to exchange information.
But empathy and caring are critical for our development.
Sociologists are pointing out a phenomenon they refer to as urban trance; people on the streets world-wide are less likely to notice, greet or offer assistance to others – they are busy thumbing their way on cell phones and blackberries or plugged into some device.
This social autism is a consequence of technology’s invasion into our daily lives.
We’re so wired to technology that we’re disconnecting from who we’re wired to be – kind, compassionate and emphatic social beings who take interest in others, serve others, grateful to God.
This is a picture of the times of our lives
• instead of happiness there is misery;
• instead of peace of mind, there is stress;
• instead of freedom there is a new form of economic slavery;
• instead of greater knowledge and wisdom we are overburdened by information.
Re-Awakening the Natural Disposition
This frantic lifestyle has a detrimental effect on our souls; distracting us and leading us into a state of forgetfulness.
One of the greatest challenges each of us face is the ongoing struggle between remembrance and forgetfulness - how do we make our daily living one of ongoing submission and remembrance of Allah.
According to the teachings of Islam, there exists at the heart of each human consciousness, within each of us, an intuition and acknowledgement of the Creator's presence.
"When I have fashioned him (in due proportion) and breathed into him of My spirit, fall ye down in obeisance unto him." (Qur’an 15:29)
The revelations of Allah and the acts of worship are meant to re-awaken in us to this spirit and rekindle this natural disposition.
Forgetfulness on the other hand is when a human being suffocates and puts down this natural inclination,
The one who does not believe, the one who rejects believing in Allah, is the one whose heart has become veiled to this natural inclination.
This veiling, which is connoted in the meaning of kufr, leads to a denial of Allah.
The challenge we face today is how to keep alive this natural inclination; how to keep our faith alive in face of this ongoing effort to veil this inclination by the lifestyle we are living.
It is in this context that we must approach fasting in Ramadan.
Looking at it from this perspective we can see the absolute necessity and value of this yearly exercise.
Ramadan is calling us to restore balance to our lives by relieving ourselves of the accumulated burdens of our missteps and misdeeds through our sincere fasting and acts of worship.
Ibrahim N. Abusharif is the editor-in-chief of the Starlatch Press, a Chicago-based publishing house, writes in an eloquent article on Islamicity entitled, Ramadan, Counterculture, and Soul:
“I remember a conversation with a zoology professor of mine during my undergraduate days. He said that it is unlikely that creatures deep in the sea have any kind of awareness of what it means to be wet, not even an awareness commensurate to primitive brains. But the irony is not restricted to fish: the greater the immersion the less aware we become of it. There is an observation generally agreed upon among religious folk, that there is indeed an immersion in the fleeting realm, and it's nearly impossible to escape it without help. It is before our senses, from billboards to broadcasts. And after a while, we're disabled from even noticing. Ramadan is help, a knock on a door, an invitation to walk out of the cave.”
O Allah! Accept our fasting, our prayers and our charity during this month of Ramadan.
O Allah! Forgive us, have mercy on us, grant us well being, and sustain us.
O Allah! Change our hearts! Change our hearts to be obedient to You!
O Allah! Forgive us our sins totally, the major ones and the minor ones, the old ones and the new ones, the manifest ones and the hidden ones.
O Allah! We seek refuge in You from knowledge which does not benefit, from a heart which is not humble, from an inner self which is never satisfied, and from a prayer which is not answered.
Ya Rabbal `Alameen. Answer our prayers, accept our repentance, cleanse us of our misdeeds, substantiate our plea, and guide our hearts!
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